Basic Book Design/Pre-Printing Checklist

Search for ", and". Consider breaking these sentences into two sentences.

Search for just, very, really, and actually, and remove.

Search for "ly-" and remove the hyphen.

Consistently use either "for example" or "e.g."

Consistently use either "in other words” or "i.e."

Search periods following quotations marks.

Search for two spaces after periods, question marks, and exclamation marks.

No hidden index entries in the front or back matter (e.g., title page, table of contents).

Use a grammar checker to ﬁnd passive voice sentences, and rewrite in active voice.

Check capitalization in all chapter and section titles.

Search for repeated carriage returns, and remove.

Replace ﬁ and ﬂ with ligatures (also ff, ffi and ffl if you have access to the expert set).

M-dashes breaking at line breaks.

Ellipses breaking at line breaks.

Automated hyphenation on. No too-short or too-long word divisions.

First paragraph of chapters, sections, and subsections not in-dented.

Chapter titles in running headers correct.

First page of chapters don't have headers, instead have drop folios (page number in footer).

Title page, ﬁrst page, etc. on recto (right-hand) pages.

No widows.

Number of pages fits into signatures (e.g., 224 pages).

Graphics neither too dark not too light.

Table of contents page numbers correct.

Index page numbers correct.

Crop PDF ﬁle pages to page size.

Bar code price correct. The price is the smaller bar code to the right. Above you'll see a number. It will start with a 5, if your price is in American dollars. Ignore the ﬁrst digit. The rest of the number is your price. E.g., “51995” means US$19.95.